05/05/2015

If you knew nothing about Yooka-Laylee, a platformer which stars two cartoon animals working in tandem with one sitting atop the other, you might guess you stumbled on to a Chinese knockoff of Rare classic Banjo-Kazooie. But thankfully, it’s the furthest thing possible from that, as it’s nearly the entire creative team behind the N64 original, no longer at Rare and under their new banner, Playtonic Games.

Banjo-Kazooie, despite a relatively short list of titles, is a platformer classic all the same, and one that has been put on ice for ages after the confusing fate of Rare and the IP itself. A while ago, when Rare was making hits on the N64, Banjo-Kazooie became heavily associated with Nintendo. Then Microsoft snapped them up for themselves, and in recent years the partnership has been…shall we say, less than fruitful. Most of the core team left, and now Rare is making things like Kinect Sports Rivals. Sequels to games like Conker’s Bad Fur Day are nowhere in sight. And the last we’ve seen of Banjo and his feathered friend was in 2008’s Nuts and Bolts on Xbox 360, not exactly a critical or commercial smash hit.

Enter Yooka-Laylee, the definitely-not-copyright-infringing-trust-us-we-triple-checked-with-lawyers platformer from the Playtonic team. The game is meant to fill a void left by the almost total abandonment of the platforming genre by everyone except Nintendo and a few ironic indies. If Rare and Microsoft aren’t ever going to get around to making a sequel, Playtonic will in everything but name only.

02/21/2015

A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a Twitch.tv livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and left them to duke it out in a battle to the death, Highlander style (except instead of heads they need capital cities).

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AI-only Civilization games are the purest form of the Civilization concept: take the beginnings of recorded human history, tweak some variables, hit start, and marvel at how a series of interesting decisions leads to a radically-different present day.

TPangolin first explored the concept in 2014, a year after he began looking through the Official SDK for Civ V (a set of tools to help modders do their thing). He found that with a feature called FireTuner he could playtest the AI, sans human player, and began to setup games to run overnight – with the end goal of making a large, detailed political map of the world.

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CivFanatics forum goer Kjetil “Kjotleik” Hvattum has a similar approach, though his motivations are different and his playground is not Civilization V but rather its predecessor, Civ IV (with the Beyond the Sword expansion). Towards the middle of 2014 he found Kossin’s AI Tournament: Season Three post, which was the third rendition of an American-style league format devised by DMOC back in 2010. (Gandhi won the first two seasons; the third was never completed.) Inspired by this and Sulla’s Civ4 AI Survivor series, and driven by the desire to learn more about AI strategies in order to move beyond the Noble difficulty level, Hvattum began plotting his own AI-only tournament.

His AI Auto Play threads take a very different tone to those on Reddit. Campaigns are completed in advance, and the community is challenged with picking who will win from just the starting positions of each civilisation. “The participation has been good,” Hvattum tells me, “and the fact that at least one person has picked the correct AI in seven out of eight games thus far is a testimony to the knowledge the CivFanatics [community] has about [Civ IV].”

08/18/2014

The killing of Mr Brown did not happen because America's citizens or its police are too lightly armed, or too reluctant to believe they have a legitimate right to shoot someone in a disagreement. It happened because America's citizens and its police are too heavily armed, and too quick to believe they have a legitimate right to shoot someone in a disagreement. It happened because Americans are losing the talent for solving social conflicts by building responsive institutions, and are instead embracing video-game fantasies of solving social conflicts through violence.

If the problem of police brutality can be explained via America's obsession with guns, then what explains Eric Garner's death, surely an instance of police brutality. A choke hold, not guns, caused Mr. Carner's death, yet his death is apart of the same general phenomenon: The excessive willingness of American cops to use lethal force. By arguing that the problem of police brutality is simply a problem with America's attitudes towards guns, M.S. lets the larger issue, that the police tend to answer to no one but themselves and the district attorney's they help to elect, slip away.

Also, if M.S. actually understood video games, he would recognize that video game violence never actually solves real-world social conflicts. Violence can solve problems in science-fiction games like Halo, but when games approach actual social conflicts, violence only serves to beget more violence. Even the campaigns of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series serve to emphasize that little of what the protagonist is doing is actually solving social conflict. The entire genre of 'violent video games', if I may speak about such a genre, isn't about solving social conflicts. Blow back is everywhere in those games, and consciously so.

If one actually wants to solve social conflicts, as opposed to, say, pwning some n00bs, one needs to find games different from Halo or Call of Duty. Strategy games like Civilization V or Crusader Kings II are more about that, and they provide plenty of different paths other than the sword for solving problems, such as culture in Civ or dynastic politicing in Crusader Kings.

The truly violent video games, Bioshock and Dead Space being examples, with both exponentially more violent than the most shiny iteration of Call of Duty, aren't about solving social conflicts. They're about survival in a violent world. Doing what it takes to survive in horrible situations. The violence of the games being manifestations of those horrible situations. There's actually little social about them, and there isn't much conflict solving going about in either them. The violence also serves to emphasize the brutality of the situations which the protagonists find themselves in. The culmination of the second act of Bioshock wouldn't be nearly as shocking if it weren't so terribly violent.

08/03/2014

An innovation soon to increase the wealth of middle-class gamers Q4 2014.

The New York Times interviews Tyler Cowen in "Tyle Cowen on Inequality and What Really Ails America", I like how Mr. Cowen approaches inequality in the first two questions:

Inequality is running amok. The richest one percent of Americans pull more than a fifth of the nation’s income. The top 10 percent take half, more than during the Roaring Twenties. President Obama seems to believe this is “the defining issue of our time.” Is it?

“Income inequality” consists of at least three separate issues: 1) the top one percent is earning more; 2) the relative return to education is rising; and 3) economic growth is slow, and thus many lower- and middle-income groups are not seeing their incomes rise very much over time. The third of these is arguably the defining issue of our time. Grouping these issues all together under the broad heading of “income inequality” I view as a big intellectual mistake.

So should we worry at all about the chasm opening up between the income of the rich and the rest?

I worry about stagnation in the middle and towards the bottom, not the income gap per se. A lot of the income growth at the top has come from globalization; for instance, Apple now sells a lot of iPhones to China. That’s not something we should be worried about. Rather, we should celebrate it.

What I find unconvincing, though, is Mr. Cowen's assertion that people haven't benefited as much from innovation today as much as they did from 1890-1930:

But aren’t soaring incomes at the top and stagnant wages in the middle connected, driven by the same forces?

Those two problems are not always the same. If today we had a rate of technological innovation comparable to say 1890-1930, the middle class and the poor would benefit tremendously from those new goods and services. Income inequality might go up or down but we could stop worrying so much about it.

That earlier period brought such innovations as electricity, the automobile, radio, the airplane, basic advances in public health, and much better fertilizers, among many others. In more recent times we’ve had a lot of innovations in the manipulation and storage of information, but this just hasn’t benefited ordinary lives as much.

I think that the innovations in the manipulation and storage of information have greatly benefited the middle class, and shall greatly change how people in the middle class, especially the younger middle class, live their lives. Though innovations in electronics and information technology hasn't resulted in as drastic a change in how society looks as the innovations of 1890-1930, they are drastically changing how people spend their time, and how people define who is in their social circle. The Economist humorously illustrated the former point with "The hidden costs of Gangnam Style":

That's just one silly YouTube video. Imagine if The Economist were to make a similar chart about the amount of time playing Call of Duty or World of Warcraft online. Modern innovations are greatly changing how people in the middle-class spend their most valuable resource: their time.

Call of Duty and World of Warcraft are silly games, you say? Well, the only thing separating junk from wealth is the value people impute to it, and people certainly demonstrate that they greatly value the those two frivolous means of entertainment. Yes, not everyone is going to value those games, but that's also an important thing about actual innovations: Not everyone is going to adopt them. We are all trying to discover how we should live our lives given new innovations, copying from those we see adopting innovations well and not copying those don't see doing it well.

The people who we see mostly earnestly adapting and therefore benefiting from today's innovations are the youth. They are the people playing Call of Duty, they are the people interacting with their social circle with Skype and smart phones, and they are the people who couldn't think of their life without the internet. They are the people whose lives will serve to most gain from the innovations of today because they are the people who are aggressively adopting them. The young middle class today are the people whose lives will demonstrate, contra Mr. Cowen, that the middle class isn't stagnating compared to the middle class of 1890-1930, it's flourishing on its own terms.

Fortunately, it doesn't matter what people thing about innovation. Innovation will continue on all the same. From how I see it, the innovations Mr. Cowen talked about from 1890 to 1930 largely gave the middle class more liklihood of living and more time to live. People now work eight-hour work days and don't have to worry too much about dying before they are seventy or so. The innovations today, like high-definition televisions, smart phones, and video games, are then changing how people choose to spend the time that they now have. Call them less impressive them you'd like, but I'll still elect to choose them impressive and life enhancing. Life enhancing in all the subtle ways that will be missed by those looking for innovations that they think should happen.